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Slashback: ClonesMAX, Animation, Dislaimers
Give me IV any old day. Rupert writes with a review of the newly IMAX-ified Episode II of the Star Wars saga:
"Since it was my wife's birthday today, last night I took her to see Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones: IMAX edition. Notwithstanding the overuse of colons, this is a movie worth seeing, even if you think you already saw the movie.If you haven't already seen AotC, you no doubt have your reasons, and there isn't anything in this edition to make you change your mind. Likewise, the plot still has gaping holes and Anakin is still moody, so if those were enough to make you hate this movie, you won't want to see it again. The action sequences gain little from the new presentation, as objects move too fast across the large screen to follow.
On the other hand, if you want to see the pores in Natalie Portman's skin, or the individual hairs in Christopher Lee's beard, this is the movie you've been waiting for. I suspect that some time was spent re-rendering the digital characters. Yoda, Wattoo and Jex Dexter stood out in close up, looking more real than the human actors.
Some scenes were cut from this edition. Some I didn't miss, such as Ani and Amidala frolicking in the meadow with the giant bed bugs. Others, such as almost all the scenes in Palpatine's office, and many of the Jedi Council made it even harder to follow what was going on.
You might be wondering where you can see the movie."
Always cut with the Groenig.
ari_j writes "It looks like Fox is giving us a new season of Futurama. From the page, "Season Premiere Sunday, Nov. 10th at 7PM/6C". Sure enough, my local Fox affiliate is carrying it as stated. From tv.yahoo.com: '"Crimes of the Hot", Episode #408.
Al Gore's head holds an emergency summit in Kyoto, Japan, to deal with global warming caused by robot emissions.'"
This does not look good on a resume. nautical9 writes "As a follow up to Henrick Schon's dismissal from Bell Labs last month for falsifying data, many of his former co-authors are retracting their articles from the AAAS's prestigious Science magazine. It's apparently the largest retraction for the journal ever. Bell labs is also pulling six different patent applications of his. Here's the Wired article."
Is this the basket you ordered for all your eggs? With regard to the AOL / ICQ integration CowboyNeal mentioned the other day, nxtw writes "At this moment, ICQ users can send messages to AIM users, but AIM users cannot send messages to ICQ users or be seen on your buddy list. However, AIM automatically postpends any screenname or group consisting of all numbers with -ICQ when added to your buddy list. (This applies to the beta AIM 5.1.3009 client.)"
They're in Australia, of course they have flying dreams. VileScum writes "Back in May a reader posted this story of an Australian Guy who built a 747 Sim in his garage. As reported in the Sydney Morning Hearld The builder and a group of his friends are now doing a round the world sim flight for charity. The full story can be found here. The details of the actual flight can be found here."
I would have to agree with the submitter. Yeah it was nice to see a few of the things larger than life, but motion blur was much more noticeable and I was miffed that they cut scenes out of the movie. During the drive back home me and my girlfriend spent more time talking about why they might have cut scenes out of the movie instead of talking about the "incredible IMAX experience".
Maybe you should educate the morons of tomorrow so they'll stop believing the leaders of tomorrow. - Dogbert
I'd definitely put Zephyr in the same category as ICQ and AIM. It had presence notification and instant messaging. It also had cool stuff like categorized broadcast messages and scripting support.
To my way of thinking, everything since has been a poor Zephyr knock-off.
sigs are a waste of space
but this is just policy...if you have a surplus of episodes, you terminate the show, and air all the episodes you have. if ratings are high enough, you hire the animator back to create new shows. it's crappy in human interaction sense, but i guess it's smart business. we can only hope that new episodes will be comissioned..this all depends on ratings, so watch futurama guys! ;)
Don Del Grande has made a handy list of what football games are where this season, and thus what the chances of Furutama (being the first show on the block, and most likely to be run into by long games) will be shown are. That post is here from google's archive.
Most likely, your best chance to catch these shows is when it goes to Cartoon Network come next year (5 times a week).
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Perhaps for Ep III they can develop cameras that will have the same resolution as the renderer that they use. (Maybe something like a digital IMAX, which doesn't exist to my knowledge)
wayner@pobox.com -- Wayne A Arthurton -- www.pobox.com/~wayner
I've heard anecdotal evidence that it was
`too real' for the cinema experience.
I can believe this comment. I have a Philips TV with 'Digital Natural Motion'. What this does is predict pixel movement, and fill in extra frames to effectively give you 100fps.
Picture quality is so crisp and smooth, that I've had comments like "it looks fake" or "it looks like the making of, not the actual movie".
Personally, I can't live without it. I go to the movies and think, crap, the pictures are all jumping round and blurry. I actually find it hard to follow action with such a low frame rate when I'm used to about 4x that. Flames and explosions look so crap without Digital Natural Motion.
Last I heard philips were going to put the Digital natural motion chips into DVD players and VCRs, so you don't have to buy the top of the line TV just to get natural motion. There are white papers on the net, but I can't find them just at the moment.
In short: I'm happy for movies to have 24fps, cause it all gets smoothed out to 100fps when I watch them anyway.
Verne.
There are only two things in this world that smell like fish. And one of them's fish...
I saw it a few nights ago here in Calgary, and have been meaning to write up a review. Seems I was beaten to it... Aside from the cuts, there's a few things that readers have thus far failed to mention.
First, while I was worried about the digital transfer on the far larger IMAX screen ("pixels as big as fists pummeling your eyes!") the picture looked very nice and clean, with a couple of exceptions. On the very rare occassion, very thin lines that are close to horizontal or vertical get a distinct case of the "jaggies", where one can see the staircase effect of pixelisation. (This is most evident during the Lucasfilm logo at the opening and at a moment during the descent of Senator Amidala's ship to Corsucant).
Second, the sound is incredible. Those who haven't heard a well-tuned theatre - and IMAXi are amoung the world's best - will get a kick out of that aspect of the movie alone.
Last - a traditional IMAX movie focuses on vistas - grand sweeping praries and the like - and where Episode II is most like this, it works very well. At other points - closeups of actor's faces, in particular - the IMAX image can be too revealing, much as the higher resolution of HDTV is acknowledged to reveal the flaws of those appearing on television. There are other scenes - that of Anakin next to the Jawa sandcrawler while searching for his mother on Tatooine, for example - that the framing of the scene is just "off".
To those intending to go, I would recommend arriving early and getting seats near the center of the theatre, for the most compelling experience - again, big vistas work well from most any viewpoint, but not head-shots. For me, it was more than worth the price of admission.
"flicker" like you see with A CRT or (I guess) movie is caused by the screen going from black to colored over and over again. You notice the change.
You don't notice flicker on things like LCDs because there is none. There is a 'frame rate' but the screen doesn't go black between each image.
Interestingly, I've never really noticed flicker at the movies even though the screen blanks only 48 times a second. 24hz flicker would be really obnoxious though.
Also, I can see flicker on a 72hz screen while moving images on it seem silky smooth.
One interesting effect of having a high enough frame rate is that you can actually see 'motion blur' with static images, for example with my old monitor I could do 640x480 at 120hz. Some 3d graphics would appear to blur as they moved, just like objects in the real world. You could probably produce some cool visual effects that at 120-200fps in a film. would be impossible at lower speeds.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
However, the scroll at the beginning looked like it was going straight up a wall, which was kind of cool. :-)
" Your right on the money, a lot of ppl (even ppl in the film industry) say they dislike digital projections because it doesn't look the same as film.
Basically people are used to a certain feel and look of projected film. "
Yeah, I think you are right. I've seen lens flare in games that at no time ever made use of a real camera, much less a lens. And I have to say it helped out, it felt more real because of the artificial defect.
"I suspect that some time was spent re-rendering the digital characters. Yoda, Wattoo and Jex Dexter stood out in close up, looking more real than the human actors." :)
Now, this I could belive. If you have watched the trends in digital imaging, the cameras today are already at the resolution limit of the lenses. Take for example the 2 biggest: Canon 1Ds & Kodak 14n, they are already shotting at 11 & 14 megapixels! Now, maybe I am wrong, but you are going to need seriously expensive glass to go with that resolution.
So, the reason why real actors will look fuzzy and CGI generated will look super-sharp is that Mr. Jackson Puss has gone through 8-15 pieces of glass, while digital Yoda only has gone through... ugh, probably none. May Pixar programmers should add lens fuzzyness to the sunlight flair and other defects?
The theater I went to is a part of a furniture store. Yes, a furniture store has a 3D IMAX theater!
The best part though was the vibrating seats whenever there was an explosion or other low-bass sound... That and the seats were made from Tempurpedic material, so they were ultra comfortable.
I've played games with lens flare and others which mimicked the brightness of the sun. If I look into the sun, the screen is almost white. As I look away, the image darkens, and the white circle of the sun shrinks. The latter effect felt far more real, as though I was there, instead of looking through a piece of glass.
If filmakers don't like the look of a crisp 48fps movie, I'm betting its because they haven't tried to get used to it. The human brain is never hardwired to look at a TV or movie screen at 24fps and think "this is a story." Perhaps the framrate helps us quickly understand we're not looking through a real window. As the Theater is alive and well, I think "real" movies would go over huge if they were simply tried. I'd love to actually comprehend Yoda's moves in Episode 2.